Goodbye, my Nizhni Novgorod

As my taxi
crossed the bridge over the Oka
River, passing over a
steep, picturesque river bank, we rolled into the sleepy center of Nizhni
Novgorod.

I looked around in dismay at my hometown.

The city seemed deeply scarred: The remains of burnt wooden and brick merchant
mansions from the 19th century, once the pride and charm of the old town, were
hidden behind garish billboards. Dozens of homes in the middle of the city
looked like war ruins. Some of the abandoned old houses had graffiti on them,
drawings of crying faces. Monstrous glass and concrete cubes dominated once
tranquil and shaded streets; I could still picture them, with my eyes closed,
as they once were.

This is not the first time bulldozers arrived to demolish a 790-year-old city
that was once Moscow’s
most reliable military fort against the Tatars of Kazan. Both Czarist and
Stalinist developers demolished a dozen 13th- and 15th-century tent-roof and
gold-domed churches in and around Nizhni’s Kremlin.

It was not the city’s fate to get destroyed in war: Houses fall here in
peacetime. Nizhni has long had a penchant for self-destruction.

To clear space for the House of Soviets, the Transfiguration Cathedral, the
pearl of Nizhni Novgorod’s 16th-century architecture, was blown up in 1931. The
grave of Kuzma Minin, the hero famous for raising a volunteer army and saving Moscow from Polish
invaders, was moved out of the Kremlin. For decades, original architecture had
been torn down to make way for gray, Soviet-era apartment blocks.

But not since the Mongol invasion has there been so much destruction to Nizhni
Novgorod’s wooden architecture in a single year. The regional authorities took
76 architectural monuments off the city’s historical register, making it
possible to re-build or demolish them. The list includes the city’s Evalanov
house, a graceful classicist home built in the beginning of the 19th century. A
pearl of local baroque, the mansion
of A.R. Batashev’s
mansion, has been gutted and the developer is planning some kind of pastiche
reproduction to replace it.

City officials have told me that nothing can be done to stop the process,
arguing that many of the buildings are in such bad condition they cannot be
preserved. But it seems that Nizhni Novgorod authorities simply do not embrace
the idea of restoration and preservation—office buildings have even appeared
inside the ancient Kremlin walls.

The region’s governor, Valery Shantsev, was deputy to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov at a time when he
oversaw the swift destruction of hundreds, more likely thousands, of historic
buildings. Now Nizhni is Moscow-on-the-Oka, a playground for the developer’s
bulldozer.

Decades ago, my father, then a “Pravda” newspaper reporter, wrote an article
called Heritage, criticizing the Soviet state plan for reconstructing the city
center by demolishing its older buildings. A delegation from Moscow arrived in response and my father was
called to the local authorities in the Kremlin. “What part of the city would
you like to preserve?” a Moscow
bureaucrat asked my father, pointing at a large city map spread across a table.
The architecture lover and reporter climbed on the table and lay down on the
map, covering the entire city with his body. The development was cancelled.

This year, activists in Nizhni Novgorod have tried various tactics to try to
save their town. Dozens of protestors came out to stop the construction of an
18-floor tower on Kavalikhinskaya
Street, but private security guards clubbed
protestors. The local state television channel aired a documentary detailing
the old town’s disappearance, block-by-block, alerting authorities to stop
before it was too late. But houses continued to disappear. Some caught on fire
at night, which was one way to avoid the paperwork of having them condemned.

Some defenders of local architecture are restoring homes against the odds.
Lidiya Davydova–Pecherkina lives in an unusual 19th-century house topped with a
tall round tower. She restored the building by studying archives. But
restoration didn’t stop developers from tearing down the house next to her,
blighting the street. She vows never to leave her home. Elena Karmazina, an
architect, has already restored one mansion. She has now moved into a magnificent,
if rundown, 19th-century house on Studenaya
Street, which she also plans to restore. “If all
city architecture lovers move into the older buildings and try to fix them, we
might save something,” Karmazina said. I hope they succeed in preserving the
best of what is left of our city’s heritage, but our hometown is almost out of
time.